With the help of computer models, scientists are painting a picture of how giant predators such as the saber-tooth tiger took down mastodons, mammoths and other megaherbivores millions of years ago.
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This means that ancient hypercarnivores were more successful in hunting down ancient herbivores which are definitely much larger than modern elephants.
These new computer models are able to calculate how big of a target an ancient hypercarnivore – such as the saber-toothed cat and cave hyena – could have tackled, reports The Christian Science Monitor.
These findings show how ancient super-predators far larger than the wolves, lions and hyenas of today once kept megaherbivores such as mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths in check, researchers said.
More work is expected to remake Pleistocene environments, “which were in obvious immensely not quite the same as today”, Van Valkenburgh said. Most of the discussion at the conference in Oxford was on herbivores, Van Valkenburgh said. It’s simple – carnivores were bigger too. Well-established formulas allow scientists to make a reasonable estimate of an animal’s size based on just the first molar. “In the fossil record, the one thing we’ve got a lot of is teeth”, Van Valkenburgh said in a statement.
Synthesizing data on the relationship between the age and shoulder height of the extinct animals versus shoulder height and body mass of today’s elephants.
Next the researchers tried to estimate the exact size of these herbivores.
“The difficulty is that, even with the best measurements, modern adult elephants with the same shoulder height may vary by as much as two times in body mass”. Add to that the “age structure”, the mix of animals of different sizes in a given herd, and her calculations of mammoth sizes cover “a whopping range”.
Nonetheless, the team developed a range for what a few of these shaggy plant-eaters would weigh. From this, an analysis by Matthew Hayward of Bangor University, United Kingdom calculated whether these big predators might be able to capture an herbivore.
They conclude that juvenile mastodons and mammoths would indeed have been susceptible, especially if the carnivores were socially organized. For example, the lions that could be seen in the Pleistocene, were roughly 25 percent bigger than the lions today, they had longer legs adapted for endurance running, weighed somewhere along the lines of a small auto and they hunted in vast prides. One UCLA study answers the question.
A pack of saber-tooth cats (Smilodon) fight with adult Colombian mammoths over a juvenile mammoth they’ve felled. In fact, the extinction of the largest hyper-carnivores, such as lions, sabertooth cats and hyenas, during the late Pleistocene was nearly certainly caused by the disappearance of their preferred prey.
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Matthew Hayward of Bangor University College of Natural Sciences in England, William Ripple of Oregon State University, Carlo Meloro of Liverpool John Moores University in England and V. Louise Roth of Duke University among others said the ecosystem was able to support the larger herbivores because the equally hungry carnivores checked their growing numbers.
